London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

Is Jane Ridley too racy to be the Queen’s biographer?

Much speculation at the Soho Literary Festival yesterday, where it was suggested that Jane Ridley, author of Bertie — A Life of Edward VII, might be chosen as the official biographer of the Queen.

Professor Ridley, daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s late Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley, has had rave reviews but some royal scribes feel she is a little too fearless in digging up royal scandal.

“It’s far too early to say,” says a Buckingham Palace spokesman, meaning it will not be discussed officially while the Queen is alive. “No decisions have been made.” However, it’s understood that the decision will be made by Prince Charles, who may favour more establishment writers such as Philip Ziegler or William Shawcross .

The feeling among female biographers is that Ridley has set an example for a woman to write about the Queen.

“Jane is a serious historian and a human person and that’s what you need to make a biography worth reading,” says Sarah Bradford. “She is a very good historian and biographer and she knows the royal archives well.”

“I thought Bertie was a rattling good read,” says Lady Antonia Fraser. “But I’m not sure this is the right approach to our own dear Queen. It is a very sympathetic portrait but no scandal is left unturned.”

Meanwhile, novelist Jilly Cooper says the Queen’s love of animals is the key. “She is so wonderful we can’t have anyone stirring up trouble,” she says. “She loves her dogs and her horses and they love her. Brough Scott might be the right person. He digs around and he is good on a horse.”

TV fakery puts paid to Kirstie’s angry expletive

Kirstie Allsopp, the property expert and one of the stars of Channel 4’s new reality show Hotel GB, which starts today, confessed an embarrassing secret to the Londoner at the show’s launch at the hotel in question, the Bermondsey Square. Allsopp takes on the role of the hotel’s concierge in the programme, which sees C4’s top lifestyle names running the Southwark hotel for a week (Gordon Ramsay oversees the restaurant, Gok Wan does the bar and so on).

But Allsopp’s confession concerns her fellow maître d’ in the hotel and longtime co-presenter Phil Spencer, and an incident a few years ago when they were filming Location, Location, Location. “I did say ‘f**k off, Phil’ because I was so angry with him but the words that were used were ‘I’m off to lunch’,” she told me. “They dubbed it but you can see the way my lips move that isn’t what I said.” She declined to comment further on yet another example of TV fakery but did offer a mea culpa: “I was pregnant at the time with my second son. When I am pregnant I’m a monster between 11.30am and 1pm, when I’m hungry.”

Radcliffe takes to the tub with Hamm

Few men get to share a bath with Mad Men’s Jon Hamm. One such lucky chap is Daniel Radcliffe, who stars with the actor in new Sky Arts comedy drama A Young Doctor’s Notebook. Radcliffe, pictured, said at the series’ premiere at the Soho Hotel on Saturday that the scene in which they share a bath tub would make him “the envy of every woman ever”. In the four-part comedy drama based on the stories of Mikhail Bulgakov, Radcliffe and Hamm play the younger and older versions of a Russian doctor. Radcliffe read out an apology from Hamm for his abscene as he was on the Amalfi coast “dipping his legs in the Mediterranean with his long-time lover. Gutted”. Hamm handpicked Radcliffe although his enthusiasm rather alarmed him. A confessed “Bulgakov geek”, Radcliffe had chosen to celebrate his own 21st birthday at the Bulgakov House Museum in Moscow.

La dolce vita, Gwynnie-style

Gwyneth Paltrow and husband Chris Martin, lead singer with Coldplay, are enjoying a family holiday in Italy where the Hollywood actress celebrated her 40th birthday. The couple, who visited Rome and sailed around Portofino before stopping for some shopping, were accompanied by their two children Apple, eight, and Moses, six. Paltrow recently revealed that she had softened her strict views on macrobiotic dieting, admitting that her guilty pleasures these days extend to eating a fresh baguette with cheese or a turkey burger with chips. When in Rome....

Bond rivals united over Liverpool

With his third James Bond film, Skyfall, on the way, it’s easy to forget that Daniel Craig battled it out with Clive Owen to be 007. So it must have been awkward for Owen, narrator of the Channel 5 documentary series Being Liverpool, to record the visit of Craig (both actors are fans of the football team) to the Reds’ dressing room. “Paying a visit to the clubhouse is one of the team’s best-known fans, 007 himself, Daniel Craig,” Owen pronounced in the show over the weekend. Owen speaks with suavity and no bitterness — traits that would have made him not a bad Bond...

* Invited onto the Today programme this morning, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls was introduced by a presenter who only alluded to the weekend’s football fixture between the Labour Party and the press. This wasn’t enough for Balls — he had to point out to listeners that he’d scored two of the goals in the 3-0 victory.

* Little has been heard from David Bowie since a 2004 heart scare, other than a statement distancing himself from the V&A’s forthcoming retrospective on his career. Now Bowie has roused himself to sign copies of The Changes Collection, which features 12 large-scale prints of him taken by Japanese photographer Masayoshi Sukita. The limited edition of 20 books is available to subscribers to Genesis Publications at a mere £1,900 a piece. With such a lucrative sideline it’s easy to see why toiling away in a recording studio might prove less attractive to the veteran rock star.

Fond memories of Angharad Rees

Pop singer Lulu, Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, actor Edward Fox and his son Freddie Fox all took part in a celebration of the life of Angharad Rees at St Paul’s Knightsbridge.

Lord Fellowes joked that the actress, who died aged 63 from cancer, and her first husband Christopher Cazenove were a fairytale couple but it was hard being married to a man who went out to the cornershop to buy a newspaper and came back with an Aston Martin.

“Angharad had a glittering career ahead of her when she decided to give it all up and devote her life to bring ing up her two sons,” said Fellowes. “I cannot tell you how much I admired her.”

* While Ed Miliband sticks to wine glasses filled with tap water, Harriet Harman is taking a more relaxed attitude to drinking. The deputy Labour leader sipped white wine at the New Statesman Labour conference reception — but when Mr Miliband entered, she vanished.

* One of Warren Buffet’s favourite social historians, Adam Fergusson, author of When Money Dies, predicts the euro cannot continue in its present form. “It’s like El Cid propped up dead on his horse leading his troops into battle,” he told the Soho Literary Festival. “It’s amazing it’s still there and hasn’t fallen off.”

Hooked on the classics

While David Cameron has revealed himself as a classics duffer by not knowing what Magna Carta meant, his cousin Harry Mount was involved in a Classics Quiz at the Soho Literary Festival yesterday.

Harry’s team of pueri was up against Rachel Johnson’s puellae, with Professor Mary Beard as chairman.

Beard resisted the urge to tell jokes about Magna Carta or plebs but there were a few anyway. Rachel said her big brother Boris had once told her he had forgotten more about the classics than she would ever learn.

The puellae beat the pueri XXXI to XXX — and the audience were invited to sing the hippopotamus song in Latin.